XBOX |OT|

[shikamaru317]

crissindahouse said:

Xbox didn't make the profit, though. Not sure why Bernie mentions the profit of a whole company when people at a specific division which isn't really part of that lose their jobs. The tax break is something to talk about but no company wants to pay people who don't make money for the company.

Also not sure what the price hike of the console has to do with this. Microsoft didn't decide to pay much more for the parts as some years ago. Are they supposed to sell a console with a loss because the whole company makes money? That doesn't make any sense.

Is a car manufacturer selling 20m cars supposed to still sell their worst model which sells only 50k units a year because some people work on these cars?

He should rather ask if it's normal that Microsoft has divisions with a profit margin of 50%+ and still paying only a joke of tax. Not why one of their worst running divisions tries to do better. The money made by the good running divisions and what MS pays in tax is the unfair part for the society. 

Yeah, Bernie is not making much sense there is he. The divisions of Microsoft bringing in most of the money are the cloud team (which Asha was pulled from the save Xbox) at 31% of Microsoft's total revenue, and the productivity and business processes division which handles things like Microsoft 365 and Enterprise Solutions, with 43% of Microsoft's revenue. The division that Xbox is inside of, personal computing, brings in 19.4% of their revenue, with much of that driven by Windows, Xbox itself fell to 3% profit margin this quarter and was expected to fall into the red by Q4 without the layoffs, Q4 being when they will either be selling Xbox hardware at an even bigger loss due to the expected further RAM and SSD price increases, or be forced to do another hardware price increase, both of which will hurt their Q4 profit more than usual. 

Socialists like Bernie believe in the rich propping up the poor, including in corporations where he believes that Microsoft's successful divisions should be forced to prop up a struggling Xbox division with no firings or studios closed/sold even as studios release flop after flops. But corporations are about the least socialist thing imaginable, when they start losing money in a division of the company they usually correct the problem instead of continuing to prop up said division. 

The tax break is controversial of course, but as I understand it, all it did was allow big tech companies to pay taxes on their R&D budget when the R&D budget for multiple upcoming years was first allocated, before they had to spread out R&D costs over 5 years, which meant they were paying taxes on yearly inflation of their R&D budget, instead of paying it upfront when the R&D budget for multiple upcoming years was first allocated. It was done to incentivize AI datacenter construction in the US so that Microsoft and Google and such could build datacenters for 5 years and pay taxes on the 2026 US dollar rather than the paying higher each year as the value of the US dollar continues to decline due to inflation, Trump believes we must win the AI datacenter construction race with China. I'm not the biggest fan of AI datacenters for multiple reasons of course, what it has done to gaming, what it does to small rural communities power grids, etc, but that is why he did it, he believes US must look good on the world stage by keeping up with China on AI.

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 07 July 2026